Basic business environment analysis: Thematic mapping with wizards and layer propertiesFred L. Miller

Basic business environment analysis

Thematic mapping with wizards and layer properties

― by Fred L. Miller

Introduction

Problem

Janice Brown and Steven Bent plan to open a new home center in the Minneapolis St Paul area. The center, called Living in the Green Lane[1], will offer a variety of environmentally friendly building products, home improvement products and construction technologies.

To develop a business plan for this enterprise, Janice and Steven must analyze the market environment in the Twin Cities area to determine if this area will support such an enterprise. This analysis involves seeking out green customers, identifying potential competitors, examining transportation patterns and pinpointing retail centers which draw consumer traffic.

Janice and Steven have discovered that “green customers” tend to have higher levels of income, education and home value than the general population of the United States. They have directed you, in your capacity as the firm’s Business GIS analyst, to use GIS resources to explore the distribution of households with these characteristics in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market area to determine if it can support their business plan.

Specifically, you will use color-coded mapping and symbology tools to map these relevant demographic characteristics in the planned market area.

Location

Minneapolis St Paul Core Based Statistical Area

Time to complete the lab

Four to six hours.

Data used in this lab from the Business Analyst Premium Desktop system

  • Demographic and consumer spending data at various levels of geography
  • Major highway and streets
  • Business listings
  • Shopping center listings

Student activity

Introductory concepts and lab description

In the context of a this new retail enterprise, the basic environmental scanning question is whether or not a market area offers a substantial potential market for the firm’s products and services? This question is inherently spatial. The service area for the enterprise is spatially limited, while clusters of attractive consumers are distributed unevenly across the market area. The question then becomes whether or not there are clusters of attractive customers of sufficient size to support the enterprise.

In this case, Janice and Steven have identified several segments of green consumers, some of whom are motivated by environmental concerns and others which require rapid payback of investments in green technologies from energy savings. They believe the most attractive segments will be True Greens, who are largely in the first category and Greenback Greens who are in the second (Schaffer, 2007). Demographically, these segments are characterized by higher levels of income, education and home value than the general population in the United States (Kannan, 2007). These are the characteristics you will use to assess the ability of the Minneapolis-St. Paul market area to support a Living in the Green Lane store.

In this Lab, you will focus on displaying, classifying and symbolizing the distribution of these key demographic characteristics across the Twin Cities area using wizards and GIS layer properties. Specifically, you will use these tools to;

  • focus on the Minneapolis St Paul CBSA market area,
  • extract data on the demographic characteristics which distinguish this firm’s target customers,
  • use various symbology, labeling and formatting tools to display this data in map layers, and
  • use data normalization and classification schemes to represent this data meaningfully.

At the conclusion of this Lab, you may be required to submit written answers to the questions in this exercise or to prepare a written project which coversboth the Basic and Advanced labs which cover business environment analysis.

Conventions used in the data

CBSACore Based Statistical Area

CY Current Year data

FY Future Year projections, which are five years beyond the current year.

HH Household

Prepare your workspace

This lab uses the Business Analyst Desktop system to perform the analysis. To prepare for it, you should confirm that Business Analyst Desktop is available on your workstation.

open a project and create a study Area

You will use Esri Business Analyst provides a range of tools to perform color-coded (also called thematic) mapping and manage the symbology with which data is displayed.

1If you havenot already done so, copy the LITGL Minneapolis St Paul project folder from the BA SpatiaLab Series DVD to the C:\My Output Data\Projects\ folder on your hard drive.

2Click Start, Programs, ArcGIS, Business Analyst, BusinessAnalyst.mxd to run ArcMap, load the Business Analyst Extension, load the default Business Analyst map and display the Business Analyst Desktop Message Center. Under recent projects, click the LITGL Minneapolis St Paul project to select it and close the Message Center.

Your screen will resemble the default map below. It displays a map of the United States and several of the country’s major cities. Notice in the Table of Contents on the left that the map has three group layers, named Business Analyst Network Barriers, Business Reference Layers and Map Layers. Map Layers includes several additional group layers, each composed of several layers whose visibility depends upon the scale and the extent of the map. You may toggle the display of all the layers in a group layer by selecting and unselecting the group layer title. In addition, you may expand or contract the group layers to control how much of the Table of Contents is visible. The same is true of individual layers. For example, turn on and expand Demographic Layers. Then expand the State Areas layer to view the Legend for the current map, which indicates that it is displaying state values for Median Household Income.

The project file for your work is ready. Within it, you will now define a study area for your analysis, in this case the Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA).

3Click the drop-down box on the Business Analyst toolbar and click Study Area to open the Study Area wizard. In the first screen, select Create New Study Area, and click Next. Select By CBSA from the available options, select From a list, click Next. Select Minneapolis-St Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI from the options, move it to the right box with the arrow key, and click Next. Enter LITGLMinnStPaul in the Name box and an appropriate description in the Comments box. Click Finish.

Several things happen. The map zooms to the study area you have created, which is outlined in a bold border. It is also added as a new group layer to the Table of Contents. Within the study area, major freeways and the boundaries of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area are displayed. Look at the Table of Contents to see why. Expand Freeways under Transportation in the Map Layers group layer. Note the difference in the selection boxes for the State View and Interstate layers. The lighter color and small bottom bar of the Interstates and Streets (Regional) layers indicate that they are available, but not displayed at all scales. This scale dependency, which you can customize in a layer’s properties, means that different layers will display as you zoom in and out of the map. These settings ensure that the more detailed layers appear only on larger scaled maps, where they are more discernible and useful.

You have created a project and study area for this study. You will now clip the data layers in the Table of Contents to the shape of the study area. This will make your thematic maps easier to read and concentrates users’ attention on the area of interest.

4Right-click anywhere in the map area, click Data Frame Properties. Click the Data Frame tab. In the bottom half of the dialog box under Clip to Shape, select Enable then click the Specify Shape button. In the Data Frame Clipping dialog box below the Data Frame Properties box, select Outline of Features, then select LITGLMinnStPaul in the Layer box. Click OK, then Apply.

All the features have been clipped to the boundaries of the study area, which appears against a blue background. You will change the background color to white.

5In the Data Frame Properties box, click the Frame tab and about halfway down, click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Background box and set the background color to white. Click OK to apply the setting and close the box.

Your map should resemble this one. You are now ready to begin symbolizing population, retail, and competitive information within the study area.

You will now save this map document so you can return to it easily.

6Click File, then Save As. Navigate to the C:\My Output Data\Projects\LITGL Minneapolis St Paul\CustomData\ChapterFiles\Chapter2 folder where you wish to save the map document. Enter LITGLBusinessPlan1.mxd in the File Name field, click Save.

create a chart map of home ownership with the Thematic Mapping wizard

One way to develop thematic maps is by using the wizard provided by the system. You will use this wizard to display home ownership rates at the county level within the study area.

1Check the box to the left of the Demographic Layers group layer, expand this group layer and uncheck the box to the left of the ZIP Codes layer.

2Expand the drop-down menu of the Business Analyst toolbar, click Maps, then Advanced Thematic Mapping to open the Thematic Mapping wizard.

3In the drop-down box, select County Areas (not County Boundaries) as the layer you wish to symbolize. Click Next.

4In the next window, select the Show a chart option and select Pie Chart from the drop-down box. Click Next.

5Select the attributes Current Year (CY) Owner Occupied HUs, CY Renter Occupied HUs, and CY Vacant Housing Units in the box on the left side of the window. Click the single arrow button to move these attributes to the right box to include them in each pie chart. Click Next.

Note: The attribute names here use CY for current-year data and FY for future-year projections. GIS systems provide annual updates for its demographic and Tapestry Segmentation datasets, the data names listed in the images in this lab may include different years from those you encounter in the software. The CY/FY convention, therefore, will allow you to use the appropriate data attributes in spite of this variation.

6Select a color scheme from the available options. Click Finish. The wizard will process your settings and produce a map of the counties in the Twin Cities CBSA. Each county will contain a pie chart displaying the portion of housing units occupied by owners and by renters as well as vacant housing units. The map should resemble the one below, though the colors might vary. If this map doesn’t display immediately, confirm that the Demographic Layers group layer is turned on and that only the County Areas layer is turned on.

Data for each county is displayed by pie charts, but several of these pie charts are hidden behind other features and county boundaries and are not clear. You will turn several layers off and adjust the properties of the County Areas layer to correct this.

7In the Table of Contents, uncheck the boxes to the left of Transportation and Hydrology layers to turn them off and make the map less cluttered.

8Double-click the County Areas layer to open its Layer Properties window, which will display the Symbology tab. Click the colored box just to the right of the Background field to open the Symbol Selector window.

9In the Symbol Selector Window, set the Outline Width to 2 pixels and the Outline Color to Black. The window should resemble the one below. When it does, click OK.

The map will now resemble the one below, though the colors may vary.

Review the charts for each county. For Living in the Green Lane, homeowners, who are more likely to invest in major projects than are renters, are primary target consumers. Renters are a secondary market with interest in making smaller investments in energy-saving technology to lower utility costs. While there are variations in the percentage of owned homes across the area, this map indicates that the overall level of home ownership is high, a favorable market indicator for the firm.

create a map of median home value with the color-coded maps toolbar

Home value is another dimension of the green-consumer profile identified by Janice and Steven. Owners of high-value homes are more likely to invest in environmentally friendly renovations and to have the financial resources of income and home equity lines of credit to allow them to do so. You will create a thematic map of median home value to display the distribution of this attribute within the study area.

1Uncheck the County Areas layer to turn it off. Expand the drop-down menu of the Business Analyst toolbar, click Maps, then Show/Hide Color-Coded Maps Toolbar.

The toolbar opens on top of your map. You may dock it to other parts of the user interface if you wish.[2]

2Expand the drop-down box for the Layer field. Note that some geographies are available for selection while others provide the option to zoom in to see them. This scale dependency is designed to present attribute data at geography levels appropriate to the map’s scale. Select ZIP Codes as the layer you wish to symbolize. A new layer is added to the Table of Contents and the map display is updated.

3Expand the drop-down box for the Variable field to reveal a list of attribute groups in the Business Analyst dataset. Expand and contract these groups to review the range of data available for color-coded mapping. You wish to map home value so enter median value in the Search field at the bottom of the window, then select CY Median Value: Owner HU as the variable to map. The map is immediately updated. Your window should resemble the one below, though your list of Most Used and Recently Used Variables will be different.

4Expand the Colors drop-down box and select a color ramp with which to display the chosen data. When you select a new color ramp the map is immediately updated.

Your map should resemble the one below, though your color choice may vary. Look at the legend of this map in the Table of Contents. There are several levels in the layer classification scheme, but it is not clear how they were derived. Moreover, variations in color are difficult to distinguish on the map and some classes seem to include very few ZIP codes, a function of the Natural Breaks classification scheme. You will adjust the classification scheme to enhance the map’s communication value.

5Expand the More Options drop-down box at the right of the Color-Coded Maps toolbar. In the drop-down box for the Method field, select Quantiles as the classification method. In the drop-down box for the Classes field, select 4 as the number of classes. Your map will redraw immediately to resemble the one below, though your color scheme might vary.

Notice that the number of classes has been reduced to four and the map is easier to understand. The number of ZIP codes in each class seems more balanced. In the Quantiles classification method with 4 Classes, the selected geographic units within the map’s extent are divided into four classes each with the same number of units plus or minus one. Thus the units with the two darkest colors are above the median value for this variable, those with the lightest two colors below it.

Check the box to the left of the County Areas layer to turn it on. The pie charts you created in that layer now appear on top of the new map. This allows you to explore home ownership and home value patterns simultaneously. As you may wish to return to this point in your analysis, you will set a bookmark here.

6Click Bookmarks on the menu bar, then Create to open the Spatial Bookmark dialog box. Enter HomeOwnValueMap as the bookmark name. Click OK. Click Bookmarks again to confirm that this bookmark appears in the initial list under the Manage Command. Click File, Save, or the Save icon to update the saved version of the map.